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repay

verbverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ɹiˈpeɪ//

Synonym of pay back in all senses.

verb

  1. 1

    Synonym of pay back in all senses.

    I finally repaid my student loans, just before sending my kids to college.

    I'll repay this wrong asap.

    But drops of Grief can ne’re repay / The debt of Love I owe, […]

    On the results of the Kent Coast electrification, which is known to be repaying so far a satisfactory return on the investment in it, a Waterloo-Bournemouth scheme shows reasonable financial promise.

  2. 2

    To make worthwhile; to yield a result worth the effort; to pay off.

    The possible importance of excessive androgen secretion and the ingestion of agents such as the fluorenamines may repay further investigation.

  3. 3

    To give in return; requite.

Etymology

From Old French repaier (“to pay back”), from re- + paiier (“to pay”), from Latin pācāre (“to settle, to make peaceful”), from pāx (“peace”) + -ō (forming verbs). Equivalent to re- + pay. Cognate with repacify and French repayer (“to pay again”).

verb

  1. 1

    To pay (cover with tar, pitch, etc.) again.

Forms

past tense
repaid, repayed
past participle
repaid, repayed
present participle
repaying
third person singular
repays
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).